@Nthapa,

Thank you for your interest! You’re currently reading Part 3 of our series. If you’re looking for previous parts, you can find them in the table above.

@Ravi,

Thanks a lot for your time and further explanation.

I understood him, the issue arise because I copied, pasted and ran the script but it gave me some errors.

On examination, I found out the file was not pasted in its original format. I formatted it and it was fine.

Thanks once more for your time; ravi means thrilled in French and I am thrilled.

@Chiadi,

Gabriel already provided explanation of that command, see:

"#!/bin/bash
# Pass the directory to backup as first argument.
DIR=$1
# Create the tarball and compress it. Exclude files with the MPEG string in its file type.
# -If the file type contains the string mpeg, $? (the exit status of the most recently executed command) expands to 0, 
and the filename is redirected to the exclude option. Otherwise, it expands to 1.
# -If $? equals 0, add the file to the list of files to be backed up.
tar X <(for i in $DIR/*; do file $i | grep -i mpeg; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo $i; fi;done) -cjf backupfile.tar.bz2 $DIR/*

Thanks for the nice write-ups. I am new to Linux and scripting, could you help explain this your line of code for a newbie:

tar X <(for i in $DIR/*; do file $i | grep -i mpeg; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo $i; fi;done) -cjf backupfile.tar.bz2 $DIR/*
Or could you re-write it in an expanded form?

Thanks in anticipation.
Chiadi